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Thursday, August 27, 2015

The transmission of a five element lineage

I give below the text of an article I have just
submitted for publication in the British Acupuncture Council's journal Acu:“We are not good at lineages
in this country, and we appear to have surprisingly little respect for others’
expertise.In fact, most of our
education system appears to be built, not so much on the idea of learning from
those of greater experience than us, but more of teaching students to discover
things for themselves, almost as if the hard-won knowledge of those preceding
them should be discarded as somehow not so relevant.I have spent many weeks since 2011 in China, introducing five element acupuncture
to what must now be many hundreds of Chinese acupuncturists, and have learnt
from these visits how much respect they show the lineage of five element
acupuncture which they view me as representing.This is why, there on the wall of the Tong You San He Centre in Nanning
where I teach, I am greeted - each time with a slight sense of surprise - by a
large panel of photographs, the first showing my teacher, J R Worsley, the
second me and the last showing Mei Long, a student of mine, who initiated my
first contacts with China through Liu Lihong, the Centre’s director.Through his writing he is the person who has
done most to stimulate Chinese traditional medicine’s search for its past roots.
For
the Chinese, the line of transmission extending back to the Nei Jing, and on
through the centuries to reach J R Worsley, then me and beyond, represents what they feel they have lost, a
direct connection to the past.In the
West, on the other hand, we seem to be, if not indifferent to this, then
somewhat disinterested in the routes of transmission, as though we are not
ourselves quite clear what lineage we are heir to.This probably stems from the fact that
generally both in this country and in China there is little clarity about
how to integrate the precepts of traditional medicine with modern attempts to
draw acupuncture closer to Western medicine.The
display of photographs which confronts me each time I return to China has made
me re-evaluate my own thoughts about the transmission of a lineage, and led me
to a new appreciation of what has been transmitted to me.The way the Chinese view what I bring to them
makes me more aware than before of the precious inheritance which has been
passed down to me, and which the Chinese now clamour for me to pass on to them.Here I am, coming from a far-off land, the
bearer of an unknown treasure, my knowledge of an acupuncture discipline which
fascinates them.And, most importantly,
somebody with thirty or more years’ clinical experience, which is something
they value particularly highly.I bring
them a precious gift, the transmission of what they regard as the esoteric
knowledge contained within the lineage of a particular branch of five element acupuncture
handed down over the centuries from master to pupil.This has found its way through devious routes
to the West and is now finding its way back to its country of origin through
me, an inheritor of this lineage. It is
useful to read Peter Eckman’s In the Footsteps
of the Yellow Emperor, Long River Press 2007, as the best, and in my view,
so far the only, in-depth study to trace these routes of transmission.In
this country we often forget how precious the legacy of the past can be,
tending to take this past for granted.To the modern Chinese, deprived for so many years as they have been of
much of the history of traditional medicine through the traumas of the Cultural
Revolution, anything which helps them trace this past is a gift to be
nurtured.Even though all practitioners
are brought up on rote learning the Nei Jing, they are aware that they have
lost many of the connections between what is in these old texts and their
practice of today.In their eyes, the
branch of five element acupuncture I represent makes these connections clear to
them.To
the Chinese acupuncturists that I teach, therefore, five element acupuncture
embodies a spiritual tradition which they regard as lacking in much of the
acupuncture now taught in China,
and connects them to a past which they feel they have lost.Its emphasis on ensuring that so much
attention is paid to the spirit is something they respond warmly to.It echoes what they have learnt from the Nei
Jing, but is something which is ignored by the TCM they are taught in their acupuncture
colleges.To
witness the joy with which they greet all the five element teaching I offer
them is to raise an echo within me of a similar joy that I experienced sitting
on my first day in the classroom at Leamington
more than 30 years ago, and learning about the Fire element with the Heart at
its centre.It seemed to me then, as it
still does, and does, too, to all my Chinese students, that to base an
acupuncture practice upon treatment of the elements was to state a natural
truth about life. Learning from the
Chinese approach to their past, I can now see more clearly than ever that I,
and every other five element acupuncturist, form one link in the unending chain
stretching from the earliest days of the Nei Jing down the years. This path of transmission passed to the West
in the 20th century and is now coming full circle on its return to
its birthplace, China,
in the 21st century.This is
indeed an inheritance to treasure."